


we have to lose (before we win)

by Issay



Series: One-shot collection [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Adults doing what adults should do, Background Relationships, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Romance, F/M, Light Angst, Monster of the Week, Post-Allison's Death, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, ignores season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-25
Updated: 2017-01-25
Packaged: 2018-09-19 21:00:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9460259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Issay/pseuds/Issay
Summary: Melissa knows he thinks about his beautiful daughter, almost a child, almost an adult, now cold and dead in her grave (coffin encased in two tons of cement, safe in death like he couldn’t keep her safe in life). That he thinks about his wife and his father, his sister somewhere out there, alive or maybe not.The adults of Beacon Hills carry on.





	

„This town is going to kill us all one day,” he says, staring into space. Melissa knows he thinks about his beautiful daughter, almost a child, almost an adult, now cold and dead in her grave (coffin encased in two tons of cement, safe in death like he couldn’t keep her safe in life). That he thinks about his wife and his father, his sister somewhere out there, alive or maybe not.

“Yeah,” she acknowledges and puts another layer of bandages on the wound she was stitching together not a minute ago. “I know.”

That’s her life now.

Sometimes Melissa feels like half the town knows the truth and that hiding this secret is ridiculous, they should have meetings in the city hall, and maybe some kind of a support group. Hell, Beacon Hills should have a neighborhood watch armed with silver, salt and powdered mountain ash. Apparently they live on a freaking Hellmouth, they should be prepared.

But the town carries on like nothing ever happens and it’s not like half of the population got killed in some freak animal attack, right?

Yeah, right.

“People know, don’t they?” she asks quietly one evening. It’s just her and Argent (she never calls him Chris, no matter what), John Stilinski went home to check on his son and Scott is running through the woods and Allison is dead so it’s just the two of them. “They just elect to not see it.”

Argent looks at her, forehead creased.

“I guess…” he mutters. “You, me, the sheriff, Deaton, Natalie Martin. No way the deputies don’t know, people working at the hospital saw unexplainable things too, don’t get me started on the high school staff. There’s that pair of hippies  who run the magic shop and sell mountain ash by the bucket. Oh, and Mrs. Holden.”

“That hag from the end of the Springfield Row?”

“Technically she’s a witch, not a hag.”

Melissa only blinks and files the information for later because that’s her life now.

“I guess it’s easier,” she says as he pours her more wine. “Not see, not care about what will try to eat us tomorrow, or the day after that.”

“Fucking monsters of the week,” Argent agrees and takes a sip of his whiskey. “We should pack our bags, set this place on fire, wait for it to burn to the ground, sprinkle what’s left with salt and leave. Never turn back.”

Melissa smiles with this strange tenderness she feels towards this man, her partner in crime and probably the only person in this town who feels as adrift as she does.

“You would never leave.”

He smiles. There are years of pain and sacrifice in this smile, there are broken mirrors and stopped clocks in the way his lips curl upwards. Melissa is still learning this painful-looking grimace, it still isn’t fully etched in her mind. Not yet, anyway. It will be.

“No,” he admits. “I wouldn’t.”

She nods.

*

Next week he goes alone to hunt a troll – an honest to God troll that moved in under a fucking bridge and somehow no one in the town noticed – and Scot has to literally drag him home.

“Congratulations,”  Melissa says, standing over his hospital bed. “Leg broken in two places, three broken ribs, a concussion, bruised spine and yes, I did stop the doctor who wanted to call in an assault you were the victim of. You were climbing the rocks in the Preserve and it went wrong. Stick to it.”

“Morphine?” He looks at her pleadingly and she almost snorts, except she doesn’t because he could have died and she can’t stop imagining him dead in the woods somewhere. And in that single moment it hits her. She’s the only one who would notice his absence, who would miss him and want to check on him even when she doesn’t need anything from him.

“Nice try,” she mutters and shakes her head. “I’ll check on you later.”

She slips out to the corridor, shaken by the sudden realization and has to put a hand on the wall to steady herself.

“You’re not the only one who cares, you know,” says a voice behind her and Melissa turns to tiredly smile at Stiles. She swears, the boy is some kind of a telepath. Actually, that wouldn’t surprise her at all.

“I don’t,” she says and is sounds almost like an apology. “You kids shouldn’t worry about us. It should be the other way around under any normal circumstances.”

“Normal has long left the building,” sighs the boy theatrically and winks at her, turning to leave. She watches him go and tries to push away the memories of him and Scott, little kids jumping and running and talking their heads off. Then he disappears around the corner and Melissa is able to breathe again.

She takes Argent home two days later.

“No, you can’t be alone,” she says for the hundredth time. He’s been protesting all the way from the hospital and she’s after a night shift and simply refuses to take his bullshit.

“I’ve had worse,” he says, grumpy and angry at the world. So she allows him to walk without her help from the car to the entrance to the house.  He stumbles and curses the crutches and he’s in pain but Argent is a proud man and she knows it’s the only way for him to learn his lesson.

“I know you’ve had worse,” Melissa says warmly when he’s finally in the guest bedroom, comfortably situated under the covers. “But the thing is, I’m not sure if you know that you don’t have to do this alone. So shut up, eat your broth, take your meds and try not to break any bones.”

He has the decency to look chastised and he finishes the broth she made the day before, compliments it, and reaches for his e-book reader. Melissa only smiles and finally drags her tired body to her own bed.

 

It’s comforting, having him around.

She knows the house is as safe as possible in Beacon Hills. She knows that Scott, her brave little boy, will stand between her and any danger. But Argent’s guns and blades are in some twisted way more natural, more normal than Scott’s claws and sharp teeth. She knows the smell of cold steel, she was married to a law enforcement officer. Melissa is not afraid of the gun she finds on day three in the cupboard they keep mugs in, or the mean-looking blade taped to the underside of a sink in the downstairs bathroom.

“Paranoid much?” she asks after discovering vials of mountain ash squirreled away between couch cushions. Chris – _when the hell did he become Chris in her mind?_ – smiles and hands her a mug filled with fresh coffee.

“Always prepared.”

She can live with that.

The thing is, it’s bloody nice to come back home to him. Scott is never around these days and she understands it, she does. He has a pack to take care of, school to graduate from, college to get into, and his own grief to work through. Dear old mum is not high on his list of priorities, Melissa made her peace with it some time ago. So it’s nice to see the house lived in, nice to get a warm cup of tea after changing from the work clothes, nice to have someone to talk to. Chris tells her about the book he’s been reading and idiotic soap operas in the daytime tv schedule, about the latest news in politics and gossip if Natalie Martin or the sheriff have dropped by to see how he’s doing.

Melissa listens to him and laughs more than she remembers laughing in the past few years.

He’s itching to hunt again, to risk his life so the others don’t have to. She disapproves but she understands because she can only imagine the loss and the pain he’s dealing with every day.

 

When he moves back to his own apartment, the house feels empty.

*

He finds her sitting on the steps to the house. It’s late in the afternoon, the car carrying Scott and Stiles off to college has long disappeared from sight. She shivers in the gusts of wind carrying the first whisper of the fall.

Chris sits down next to her and doesn’t say anything. She’s grateful for that. Allison should have been in that car, should have gone with the boys to the brighter and better things. Melissa thinks of the concrete and the loneliness and is afraid of the reversed parallels of their lives.

Until few years ago, she had no idea this world even existed, safely ensured in the non-magical, non-supernatural reality.  He was born into it, his family has known all along.

She had a husband, he had a wife. She’s divorced, he’s a widower.

She has a son, he had a daughter.

Scott is alive, Allison is not.

So they sit there in silence and if his arm embraces her, if Melissa huddles closer to his warmth, well… It’s nobody’s business, really.

They carry on. Even with Scott and most of the pack away, Beacon Hills is still not an overly safe place to be so they deal with it any way they can. There’s a system of hiding places and weapons caches all over the town, there’s a bunker and the Hale vault, and even one bomb shelter conveniently lined with mountain ash panels. They survive an honest-to-God demon invasion and Melissa meets other hunters, learns how to draw traps and exorcise the possessed. Deaton has some ancient-looking books for her and she spends her long, lonely evenings reading them, filling legal pads with notes and recipes for medicaments and comes up with some more modern ones on her own. She makes friends with the store-owning hippies and has her basement remodelled so she can have a workroom slash laboratory there.

Chris helps.

He gives her herbs from different corners of the world she wouldn’t be able to access on her own and translates ancient scripts for her. They spend an evening arguing about the pros and cons of fresh herbs versus dried ones, and after that he spends a week digging through her little backyard, creating a garden with tiny but functional greenhouse.

“Mom?”

Melissa looks up from the pie crust and smiles at Scott, her adult little boy who came home for Christmas.

“Yes, honey?”

Scott sits down at the kitchen table, looking supremely uncomfortable and Melissa knows her boy, she already knows what it is about. But she’ll be damned if she makes it easy on him. Some squirming will help with character growth, or so she keeps repeating herself.

“Mom, why does the house smell like mister Argent?”

Her fingers twitch, deep in the cool, heavy crust.

“Do you have something against it?”

Scott sighs but shakes his head. She expected a fight. She expected him to say that Chris is more likely to get killed, that she’ll be left behind with no one to turn to, that there are things she has to keep in mind and consider over and over again. But maybe Allison’s death and everything that came to pass after her changed Scott in more profound ways than Melissa suspected.

He gets up and kisses her forehead gently.

“If he makes you happy, go for it,” he says. “Don’t waste any time.”

As he leaves, Melissa thinks – not for the first time – that she would give anything to turn back the time and take this painful wisdom of an old man away from her little boy’s eyes.

*

In the end, it’s the natural progression of things.

Chris’ clothes migrate to the closet in her spare bedroom (because more often than not after another hunt or another fight there are holes and slashes and blood all over what he’s wearing) and a full set of male toiletries appears in the downstairs bathroom. When he’s tired and in pain, when he needs a place to rest his weary head, he goes to her. Always to her.

Somehow, her house becomes his home and she embraces it.

The first time he kisses Melissa, they’re both covered in green, sticky goo left behind by some sort of a reptile he just shot. Chris smells of water and cold metal. She kisses him and laughs when he breaks the kiss to shoot the thing again.

“It moved,” he explains and goes back to kissing her, his arms around her, gun still in the hand resting in the small of her back.

It’s not a happy end, she knows. She’ll probably lose him to claws or fangs but before that happens, she wants as many moments as she can get. One day Scott will come home in the morning and find Chris in the kitchen. He’ll move in with her eventually, she’ll marry him if he ever asks, and she’ll even let Lydia Martin plan the thing (because no one in their right mind ever refused Lydia anything).

It’s not a happy end because it’s not an end at all.

**Author's Note:**

> I completely ignored sheriff's canonical name, as well as everything that happened in seasons 5 and 6 (since at the time of publishing this 6A is still running and s5 was just incoherently stupid).
> 
>  
> 
> [Find me on tumblr!](http://issayscorner.tumblr.com/)


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